And I thought they wanted you to stay over on Saturday night

Earlier this evening, I booked a round-trip flight, on American Airlines, from Baton Rouge to DFW for my grandmother. It’s for the first weekend in August, to celebrate my son’s birthday.
Initially, I was looking at mid-morning flights out of Baton Rouge on Saturday, August 5th, and a mid-afternoon return flight from DFW on Tuesday, August 8th. I found great times for each, but the total ticket, even with a supposed senior discount, was $361, after applicable taxes and fees.
I changed the flight out of Baton Rouge to Friday, August 4th, same time of the day, and the price dropped to $260.
So apparently the new savings comes in with the Friday stay-over…

Miscellany

Photojojo has a review of the Lensbaby 2.0, a $149 retro novelty lens for digital SLRs.

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From the “Things That Make You Go ‘Huh?'” Department, Tom gives us Mr. Martin Heidegger. After reading Heidegger’s quote, I have the mental equivalent of wanting to get a bad taste out of my mouth…

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In line with my smart-aleck nature, there are more good t-shirts I want, but I would need to perform a serious shirt purge first.

Veto the line-item veto

I’m sure, like Jeff and Mark Alexander, I fall in to a distinct minority of conservative-minded folks in that I do not approve of the line-item veto.
Jeff gives a great example of the sort of situation fiscal conservatives point to as their case for the line-item veto:

Congress has embraced the notion of passing ten-thousand-page omnibus bills that provide an appropriation for buying missiles, invest taxpayer dollars in education, reform the health-insurance, and by the way also fund half a dozen wasteful squanderings of the federal treasury. And if the President wants to veto it, he has to veto it all. Nuts, right?
As Jeff goes on to say, yes, it is nuts. But members of Congress need to stand up and defend their reasons for why they want these “wasteful squanderings” included along with the legitimate items in such bills. (Though I will quibble that the government has no business in the health insurance business, either.) Equally so, the President–and this is any president, not just the current one–should get the message out to the American people why he’s vetoing the entire bill, despite all of its good and legitimate items.
More communication is the key. As Jeff puts it, the American people need to be made smarter as to the machinations of their government. The two parties seem to enjoy playing politics, so why not extend that to budgetary items? If Congress sends you a spending bill with bridges to nowhere in it, you veto it, tell the American people you vetoed it because of the bridges to nowhere, and mention you’d be happy to sign it when it comes back without the bridges to nowhere within. Likewise, if Congress sends a spending bill without any largesse–stop laughing, this is a hypothetical after all–and the President still vetoes it, Congress has that handy two-thirds majority thingy from the Constitution.
Like net “neutrality” legislation, I think the line-item veto is a mountain that’s actually a molehill. We have more important areas to concentrate on, like keeping those who wish to kill us outside of our borders.

Lee is going to hate me for sharing this…

Just downloaded the 214 MB Mac OS X 10.4.7 Intel Combo updater at a rate of 1.6 MB per second. That’s a big B. As in megabytes.
Fiber optic rocks.

About those WMDs in Iraq

Oh, by the way, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A lesser man might say something like, “Suck it, mouth-foamers”, but I’ll refrain from engaging in such childish behavior.

Doyle Redland

If you’re not listening to The Onion Radio News, you’re missing a good chuckle.

No MySpace for me

Lee perfectly sums up my feelings on MySpace.

Miscellany

I love the build names for Ubuntu Linux: “Breezy Badger”, “Dapper Drake”. Are they all alliteral?
[Via Paul.]

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Though I don’t do nearly enough of either, I love hiking and camping, and could see myself as a flashpacker.

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Stephen H. Wildstrom has the latest idiotic move by the recording industry, which is suing XM Satellite Radio over its Inno portable receiver/recorder. Even though there’s no way to get the XM-specific music files off the Inno (yet), and despite the millions and millions of dollars in royalties XM already pays the music industry, the Inno is obviously a threat to the future of music as we know it and it must be stopped.
In other news, consumers welcomed more artists as the latter left the major music labels…

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Entrepreneurs should check out the WSJ’s StartupJournal.

It’s not my kid, so it must be okay

Tony Blankley:

At journalism conferences, the question is often brought up whether a journalist should see himself as an American first or a journalist first. Often the consensus is that they are journalists first.

I wonder how many of them would report a story if it would mean the death of their own child. And would any of those reporters who would be journalists first in even that appalling instant cheerfully mis-report a story in order to cause the death of their child? I suspect virtually none would.

If only they loved their country’s young and willing warriors as much as they loved their own children.

But the journalists today are too swept up in their own dance macabre to even notice the murderous consequences of their own malfeasance — or to hear the demands of simple decency.

We’re at war with whom, exactly?

A majority of those who support the war on terror have long noted this war is with the fringe element of radical Islam, not the entire Muslim world. The Bush administration has made this point in countless speeches on the issue, to the point of nausea whenever the President says “religion of peace”.
Yet what are we to think about this, that it is only “radical” Islam we are fighting, when those supposedly in the mainstream of the Muslim faith, knowing of the spreading of jihadist propoganda in their midst, and perhaps even knowing of jihadist plans of attack, fail to alert the authorities regarding these matters? Is that not tantamount to collusion, and if so, does this not mean we are finding ourselves at war with the entire Muslim world?